I read Jane, Unlimited

This week's novel is Jane, Unlimited by Kristin Cashore.

Jane recently lost her beloved Aunt Marigold, an underwater nature photographer who raised Jane since she was a baby.  Her death leaves Jane adrift, dropped out of college and with nothing that makes her happy except designing and crafting umbrellas.  When Kiran, a wealthy friend, invites Jane to stay at her mysterious family mansion on an island, Jane goes and find that the house is full of mysteries.

This book starts by introducing you to a grieving Jane, to the weird house, which is filled with priceless art and was built a hundred yeas ago from chunks of other houses either stolen or bought, and to Kiran's family and the house staff.  The reader is immediately presented with a whole bunch of mysteries and it's made clear that everyone in the house is hiding something.  Jane's in a sleuthing mood, and at the end of the first chapter, she has the option of trying to get answers from six different people. In the second chapter, she follows one person and finds herself in the middle of an art theft mystery, which she solves, and the book seems to end.  Then chapter 3 throws the reader back to the end of chapter 1, where she then follows a different person and finds herself in the middle of an international spy ring thriller.  Every chapter is a different timeline, solving a different mystery. 

It's fun because you can see hints that the events of one timeline are playing out during the other timelines unless Jane's actions change something.  You can tell that events you saw in chapter 2 are still happening in chapter 3, but without Jane in the thick of it.  You see weird blips of events that will be explained in later chapters.

So by the end of chapter 3, I was very excited to solve the next mystery: what happened to the step-mother who mysteriously vanished.  But the book took a hard right turn and it became clear that each chapter is not just a different timeline, but also a different genre.  So in chapter 4, the book introduced...ghosts?  Creepy ghosts, who I did not like.  While I was ready for some sci-fi elements and possibly some portal fiction, I was not expecting Gothic horror.  I probably would have been more onboard with the rest of the book had the ghost not altered the text of Winnie the Pooh in order to be creepy.

The ghost is bad news, y'all.

Mostly I'm impressed with how well Cashore kept track of all the details: where everyone is at any given time, what Jane knows (which is nearly reset at the start of each chapter), and what the reader knows, which is handled so well that it's amazing.  Things feel like they're introduced in exactly the right order and the chapters themselves are placed perfectly.

I do not envy what Cashore's editing process must have been like.

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Next week: Seraphina, YA dragons and music assistants by Rachel Hartman.